“I love Hogweed,” I said to a friend a few days ago. But can people love whole species? A species is a category and, according to some, a humanly constructed one. Such a term creates a boundary of inclusion and exclusion, pulling us away from the particularity of this flower in this moment. What could it possibly mean to love a cold and divisive lattice of generality? On the face of it, it seems like a misdirected emotion— possibly a reflection of my own human-centeredness, my own failure to see the individuality of the plants themselves. Could this be this superficial speciesm masquerading as love?
That I am endeared to Tilia trees on the basis of having one in the back garden of my childhood home is a betrayal of the depth of experience I actually had with that being. Doesn’t it seem unlikely that people would love all other humans through having had a deep connection with a specific one? And if that did happen, it would seem somehow wrong— dehumanising. You can only love a category to the extent to which you fail to see the differences of its members. And yet, my feeling of attraction to, and desire to care for certain plant species is greater than it is for others.
And yet, and yet. A species also feels to me like something more than ‘just’ a category. It is also a recurrence. The growth and development of Hogweed is bound with the passing seasons. The pattern is real and very visceral: it is a yearly return of bright green hands splayed across the bare spring soil, frizzy white wrinkled leaflets skyward bound, a rapid acceleration towards the sun, the flower’s rupture from its papery sheath, the explosion of symmetry in pink or white, the spicy grapefruit and cardamom scented seeds left behind to dangle from dying stalks as the light and warmth recede. It is a return of associations with other plants, animals and with my memories too. Perhaps long-lived trees— those veterans seeped with centuries of idiosyncrasy— do not need to reproduce their pattern to keep these realities alive. We can simply wander back to the same tree again and again. But the return to annuals, and the way they stitch themselves into the memory of people and places, requires, it seems, the transcendence of the individual organism. After all, the bumblebee yearns for the Bramble blossom every July.
Each spring, my backyard Tilia spreads out new shoots and the tree’s form shifts, from the canopy all the way down to its epigenetics. Some view a deciduous tree as a decentralised fury of annuals tied to a woody structure for ease of water and nutrient. So, perhaps we never return to the ‘same’ tree either. The idea of loving an individual and distrusting the love of a recurring pattern is perhaps not anthropocentric speciesism at all, then, but rather the conceit of those with central nervous systems! Perhaps. But I am not sure even this is quite right. Plants teach us about the reality of types, a kind of platonism that wraps its lessons back even into the human: is it not true that when we love another person, in some sense we love the recurrence of their pattern, too? Is this pattern not itself the collaborative recreation of countless beings and processes? Every cell is recycled, every memory and habit restored. Differences and repetitions, themes, and variations, through and through.
It would be absurd to say that I only love my wife in a series present moments. I also love her overall person, even though this ‘her’ is not instantiated in any specific moment. I only experience her in individual moments, but those moments are part of an overall pattern which includes all the moments I have and will experience with her. I have never met that overall person, because I cannot experience all these moments simultaneously. But I love that person anyway. Loving a species is extended across instances in space, loving an individual person is extended across instances in time. All individuals are types, all categories are unique patterns of becoming.
And love happens in the interplay between all these contradictions.
Pure science is an erotic pursuit. Unlike applied research, which merely aims to create and control, the pure scientist’s quest is a reaching towards mystery. It is an attraction to what is glimpsed but hidden, felt but veiled, possibly elusive, and possibly untouchable. It is filled with risk and uncertainty and yearning. And like any erotic dynamic, its success is often deflationary. When first uncovered, scientific insights are earth-quaking— but quickly become quotidian. Who marvels much anymore that the earth revolves around the sun, or that humans are the product of evolution? Can you imagine how stunning these discoveries must have been when they first arose? The great insights science sometimes achieves are revolutionary moments of human communion with nature, moments of synchronicity— when our way of understanding meets the world. They ought to be lingered upon and revered, not shuffled into the minds of children as mere fact. What happens when schools or societies merely present the world without its startling or hidden aspects, without its fathomless depth? What ought we do to retain and enrich the erotic potential of existence?
I ask these questions as I consider the work of plant scientists investigating the secret lives of the vegetal world. On the one hand, I am enthralled by such research and excited by where it may take us. I see it as a key of hope that might unlock the modern, anaesthetised mind to the wonder of the plant world. The plethora of books on plant intelligence, communication and behaviour certainly suggests a contemporary appetite for such insight. But I am also concerned this might be a deal with the devil. At what point have we gathered enough suggestions that the plant world is more than it appears to be? Does science need to rush in and bring every dark underside into the glare of its explicit light? Of course, plant explorations may be endless, in which case we need never worry about all these sacred question marks getting flipped on their heads. Each answer would always reveal new questions, and the erotic would be forever intact. Yes, perhaps everything in the universe has infinite sides to it— an insurance against the sloppy greed of reaching hands. It would be a gift we hardly deserve.
But perhaps not.
There was only one Copernican revolution. From that point on, progress has been about filling in details. Consider the discovery that Jupiter has moons. Fascinating to be sure, but not earth-shattering. That the sun itself spirals around the Milky Way, while still cool, does not have the same mind-bending significance as earth’s original displacement. It is a variation on a theme, as is the finding that the Milky Way is itself spinning around some even greater celestial centre. So, too, there was only one Einsteinian revolution, and one Darwinian revolution— even though people continue to discuss how spacetime works and evolution occurs. So, perhaps one day there will be no more revolutions left to be had. Perhaps after discovering plant learning and plant communication, we will continue to debate all the bits and pieces of how it happens, but in a sense, it will all be the equivalent of finding more moons orbiting Jupiter.
I suppose I am beginning to wonder heretical things. Has the time come to ask if slowing down, or even stopping scientific research into plants might be needed? We have enough empirical data to meditate upon for decades to come. Perhaps we need to work out what kind of relationships are being asked of us given the insights gained, given the silences we can still feel, and to do more listening than quarrying. But we seem hellbent on pushing past what we have tasted rather than dwelling on it and allowing it into our minds and hearts. I have often argued that pure science is important, and been critical of what seems instrumentalising and corrupt about applied science. But would it really be all that bad if capitalism continued to claw away at pure science and succeeded in reducing all inquiry to technological research and development? If, in desecrating our capacity to uncover the glory, the churning economy accidentally protects it? I suppose the eros that drives me to pure science is the same eros that hesitates before it.
One might counter: what you say about scientific progress might be generally true, but scientific facts that point towards and make more plausible the possibility of sentience in another creature are an exception. For hundreds of years, Western science has fixated on explaining the world through identifying underlying mechanisms and regularities. As a consequence of this way of thinking filtering down into society, many people see plants as no more than very complex molecules. Beautiful perhaps, but certainly not as having any inner life. One could see the explosion of interest in plant intelligence as an attempt to culturally recover from the grip of this worldview. The surprising complexity and responsiveness that science reveals makes it again conceivable to ask questions such as: ‘What is it like to be a plant?’ In this way, science may be saving plants from the effects of former science, of lifting itself out of its own limitations. By opening up the possibility of sentience in another, science is thereby birthing an unknowability into the universe it presumes to know. Further scientific insight into plants would become more beguiling the more we catch glimpses of the previously unknown because the sentience of another
can only be inferred but not experienced directly. So, at least in this instance, science might be bringing the mist back to the mountaintops.
But is this the antidote we need? I tend to think this gain is temporary and full of risk. It seems to me that intelligence, decision-making, communication, or behaviour revealed in plants by science invariably appears under the vice of mechanical explanations. Science cannot do otherwise. Its entire strategy is to create explanations that are reliably and physically observable. Even our brains, conscious if anything is, appear as but a dizzying network of chemistry and physics when looked at closely enough by science. Even if the organisation of the material world causes consciousness to emerge, no model of the brain leads intuitively from stuff to subjectivity. It is not clear whether neuroscience, let alone plant science, would be able to free anyone from the totalising clutch of scientific mechanism. The only reason we are able to defer this perspective in plant science or in neuroscience is because we have not yet discovered all the mechanisms. Here, remaining question marks provide a promissory note, a space where the objective and the subjective might paradoxically co-exist. But as long as science is the principle means of discovery, only objects will be pulled from that ever-diminishing pool of space.
In any case, knowledge is too cheap in our era. We google it for a quick fix. The erotic is fragile, the mist on the mountain burned away by the sun. We run to the light in the glee of revelation, and the erotic becomes an ever more endangered experience. We must do what we can to nurture it. I suppose what I am suggesting is that human knowing should slow down and re-join the rest of the human spirit, get back into intercourse with the ecology in which it exists— which includes the heart, the body, and the world. I suppose I am suggesting we sit back and spend some time quietly with the plant world, rather than reading about it on the backs of their fallen ancestors. The meaning of recent insights needs to circle back into direct experience, so new intimacies and new questions can arise in encounter with the plant world around us.
I was born and raised in a settler city sprawling through the middle of traditional Anishnaabe territory. Despite living and breathing land kept by Anishnaabe people, my education occurred within, and indeed maintained, a bubble separating me from this broader cultural world. I grew up with a love, admiration and care for the living world around me, and yet even here, my stock of concepts was influenced by people born to those across the Atlantic, not by the children and tenders of my own watershed.
Despite this all too familiar scenario, a number of concerns with the environmental narratives circling about crept into my consciousness. One concern was with the term ‘invasive species’, a label cast so casually by those within my bubble. Even if these creatures were shaking up existing ecological balances, it bothered me that adults taught children to vilify them under the guise of ‘education’. I wondered if the phrase victimised not only Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Purple Loofestrife (Lythrum salicaria) and countless other animals and plants, but also the young recipients of these words, replacing the possibility of enchantment in their story of the world with experiences of judgment and division. When the xenophobic language of the populist right in Britain and North America regularly hit my social media feed, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the stock of metaphors used in politics was being imported into ecology. I was struck by an apparent contradiction: many of my environmentalist friends were appalled at the use of such language in the human realm but adhered to it unflinchingly in the field of the green, the feathered, and the furry.
How could the impulse to ‘other’ others be condemned in one context but taken up in another? I pondered whether something Jungian was at work. Even if invasive species were sometimes causing disturbance to local ecosystems, is calling them ‘invasive’, creating ‘eradication programs’ and all the rest of the militarism, really the best way to approach them? Are many of us settlers and globally mobile citizens unsettled in our depths about where we ‘should’ be living? Are environmentalists projecting onto other species a darkness within? What inner work do we need to do before treading into questions of how we might treat these prolific newcomers?
Now living in the land where my grandfather was born, and still not feeling quite at home, I stand at the edge of the Water of Leith, watching its inexorable flow under the crisp, winter sun. I imagine clusters of Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) clambering along its edges sometime after the summer crests and the days start shortening again. The government has occasionally called the Royal Marines in to destroy this showy, pink flower, and researchers are investigating biological diseases to wipe them out. But bees have accepted this plant into their web of relations, delighting in what seems a joyous frenzy from its copious nectar. When does a plant— or a person —become native to a place?
Newspapers regularly remind us of ‘pollinator collapse’ set in motion by a collision of threats; from pesticide use to habitat destruction. Might Himalayan Balsam’s flourishing be part of ecological rebalancing rather than disruption? Few questions so quickly furrow my ecologist friends’ brows. Perhaps their irritation is warranted. Alongside other local species, bees seem to favour Himalayan Balsam (Horsely, 2016). The presence of Himalayan Balsam may thereby reduce the pollination of other species, some already curbed by its fecundity. But like many ecological studies, how we bracket our vision turns out to be crucial. A study must have a beginning and an end, and conclusions are drawn from within these boundaries. While the results are in a certain sense objective, the decision of when to start and stop the study is not. In this case, as long as the Himalayan Balsam’s nectar exceeds the needs of the bee population, bees may well favour it to the detriment of other plants. But such a scenario is obviously temporary. At some point Himalayan Balsam’s plentiful supply will increase pollinator populations but can no longer supply the demand. Other less alluring food sources are then sought out. Davis (2011) calls this ‘the car dealership effect’. In recent years, some popular science books have argued that invasive species seem to cause fewer extinctions than previously assumed (Pearce, 2015; Thomas, 2018). Perhaps they jump in to fill opening niches and catalyse evolutionary change?
Others point out many invasive species run rampant because they have no natural predators. Maybe so, but the best way to ensure a predator develops is to let a would-be prey expand its range. If there is any ecological rule, it is that an unexploited niche is an evolutionary opportunity. It is not clear how long we’d wait for animal grazers to step in, but we can be confident opportunistic microbes will quickly emerge. Again, the question is timescale. People are currently testing fungi that might infect Himalayan Balsam (Tanner et al., 2015)— but we know that if we didn’t, something would evolve anyway. What is the rush? What kind of hero story do we need to maintain? Why do we need to insist that the intervention restoring balance come from us rather than nature? And how does this hero story link up with the villain story? Is there a tragic feedback loop between guilt and hubris? Instead of revelling in a nature increasingly manipulated to fulfil an image we’ve concocted from the arbitrary past, might we not become careful students and attentive lovers of the process by which ecosystems adjust and accommodate change? Is nature an active intelligent process or a static process to be preserved? Might ecosystems’ self-regulation exceed our comprehension? The biosphere, after all, evolved myriad creatures in complex co-existence with all their countless fascinating features. Surely the arrival of new species— be it through hitching on the backs of birds, on logs projected into the seas by violent monsoon rivers, or through continental merging —is nothing new in the story of the Earth. What role does patience, indeed humility, play in conservation?
With these thoughts in mind, I google how Anishnaabe people view invasive species. As many Anishnaabe people still live in intercourse with the land, I imagine invasive species might impact them more directly than urbanites who malign new species’ encroachments on their places of leisure. Reo and Ogden’s (2018) ethnography of indigenous Anishnaabe communities reveals some common features lacing through a wide variety of views and practices towards invasive species. Anishnaabe people are likely to view invasive species as migrating communities or, as they call them, nations. Many consider every nation to have gifts to share, and accepting their gifts fosters reciprocal responsibilities of care and respect. Human and more-than-human nations may not yet know or understand the gifts a new nation might bring to a place, but all have an active role in co-determining the new relationship that will emerge. So, whilst important food and medicines are often significantly affected by the arrival of a new species, for the most part the attitude is ‘let’s wait and see’. In other words, the process begins with listening.
Perhaps we need not wait for fungi or bacteria to make food of Himalayan Balsam. It has been around the British Isles long enough for many of us to know how delicious its yellow seeds can be. To me, they taste a bit like watermelon. If more of us consumed this offering with gratitude, their numbers might be controlled but not eliminated, and our community made the better for it. That might be a better lesson for our children.
References
Davis, M. (2011) ‘Do Native Birds Care Whether Their Berries Are Native or Exotic? No.’ in BioScience, 61(7): 501–502
Horsely, C. (2016) ‘Alien invasions! Himalayan Balsam, friend or foe?’ in Buzzword 32, November 2016
Pearce, F. (2015) The new wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation. Icon Books: London, UK
Reo, N.J. & Ogden, L.A. (2018). ‘Anishnaabe Aki: an indigenous perspective on the global threat of invasive species,’ in Sustainability Science 13: 1443-1452
Tanner, R.A.; Pollard, K.M.; Varia, S.; Evans, H.C. & Ellison, C.A. (2015) ‘First release of a fungal classical biocontrol agent against an invasive alien weed in Europe: biology of the rust, Puccinia komarovii var. glanduliferae,’ in Plant Pathology, 64(5):1130-1139.
Thomas, C.D. (2018) Inheritors of the earth. Penguin: New York